Hollywood Park timeline

INGLEWOOD>> — There was a time, roughly in the middle of its 75-year run, when Hollywood Park was the best thoroughbred racetrack in America. Its mild climate and innovative management lured the greatest horses, jockeys and trainers. Its champions were the nation’s champions. It was a deserving pick to host the first Breeders’ Cup.

As great as they were, the stars on the track were outshone by the stars in the stands.

“Fred Astaire used to sit next to me in the box seats,” said Vince DeGregory, 81, a jockeys’ agent who was dazzled when he arrived from New York in 1970. “Burt Bacharach was my good friend. Vince Edwards (‘Ben Casey’) would always be here.”

Hearing DeGregory talk, other jockeys’ agents in the stable cafeteria one recent morning chimed in with more big names from the old days: The movies’ Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor and Jimmy Stewart. TV’s John Forsythe, Desi Arnaz and Don Adams. Sports’ Wilt Chamberlain, Dick Allen and Jerry Buss.

“You saw all the famous movie actors make a big deal about horse racing; it made you feel like this is the place to be,” DeGregory said. “It was exciting every day.”

Soon such memories will be all that’s left of Hollywood Park.

The track is scheduled to go out of business after its current season ends Dec. 22. The quarter-mile-long grandstand and other structures are expected to be razed within months. The 238 acres are to become a “new modern community” of homes, stores, entertainment, offices, a hotel and park space, a project the developers cheerfully call Hollywood Park Tomorrow.

Next year, Southern California’s year-round racing calendar will look a lot different, with Santa Anita Park in Arcadia and Del Mar Race Course in San Diego County picking up some of Hollywood Park’s spring-summer and autumn dates, and Los Alamitos Race Course in Orange County adding two short thoroughbred seasons to its quarter-horse schedule.

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Other than a few who are still rooting for the 1,000-1 long shot that a savior will swoop in to buy the property and continue racing, Hollywood Park’s fans, horsemen and 471 year-round employees have accepted that the end is a week away.

The land is simply worth more without the horses.

Pick an emotion — mournfulness, resentment, resignation. It is represented in conversations all over the racetrack, and it’s justified.

Never believed it

“There’s certainly a lot of sadness,” said horse trainer Ron Ellis, a San Fernando Valley native who has been a Hollywood Park regular since he got his first racetrack job in 1975 at age 16. “For 10 years, it’s been rumored that it’s going to close. But you never believed it was really going to happen.”

Fan Joe Blazok said he’d hardly missed a Saturday of racing at Hollywood Park in the past 30 years, taking buses from Santa Monica.

“It’s killing me to see this closing,” said Blazok, an 86-year-old retired city of Santa Monica groundskeeper, as he looked up from his racing program and ballpoint pen. “I’ll probably bet at Santa Anita and Del Mar. But it’ll never be the same.”

Like many, Elliott Berland, who has worked at Hollywood Park as an admissions seller and usher since 1981, expressed bitterness over the 2005 sale of the track by Churchill Downs Inc. to a concern ominously called the Bay Meadows Land Co.

“The highest bidder took it. And the highest bidder doesn’t care about the racetrack,” Berland said. “It hurts. This didn’t have to be.”

Berland takes no risk in being bluntly critical of his old and current bosses. Now 65, he doesn’t plan to seek a job at another racetrack. “What are they going to do, fire me?” he said.

Hall of Fame trainer Neil Drysdale notes that despite the general belief the racing industry is in free fall, betting on Hollywood Park races during this year’s spring-summer season actually hit a three-year high of $9.4 million a day, even though track management made no serious marketing effort.

But that figure is well below Hollywood Park’s all-time wagering high of nearly $12 million a day five years ago. On-site crowds in the 2013 spring-summer season averaged less than 3,800, less than 11,000 when Southern California’s other wagering sites were counted, continuing the slide from Hollywood Park’s all-time high of 34,516 a day in 1965 and a fraction of the 25,627 a day in 1984, the year of that first Breeders’ Cup.

Those numbers tell a story: Hollywood Park no longer feels like the place to be.

Look hard for history

People have to know where to look to find glimpses of the old glamour: The statue of Swaps and jockey Bill Shoemaker near the clubhouse escalator and the memorial to Native Diver in the saddling paddock — monuments to equine champions of the 1950s and ’60s. The park-like infield that inspired the facility’s nickname, the Track of the Lakes and Flowers. The luxury seating area that old-timers still call the Cary Grant Pavilion of the Stars, though it long ago was taken over by the Hollywood Park Casino poker room.

In general, of the three major Southern California tracks built after California legalized parimutuel gambling in the 1930s, Hollywood Park doesn’t show off its history as well as stately Santa Anita or its hipness as well as beachside Del Mar. It had to be rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1949. It underwent major renovation after R.D. Hubbard wrestled ownership away from Marjorie Everett in 1991.

There is nothing to remind visitors that the first Hollywood Gold Cup was won by Seabiscuit, the literary and cinematic folk hero and one of 11 Gold Cup winners to be named national Horse of the Year; that this was where Citation, in 1951, became the first racehorse to go over $1 million in career earnings; that Zenyatta scored some of the biggest of her 19 consecutive victories here.

Only horseplayers of a certain age remember Hollywood Park’s role in spicing up racetrack betting by adding “exotic” wagers such as the exacta and the pick-six to the traditional win, place and show.

Some historic displays have been taken down as the track prepares to close. Remaining in the grandstand are a few photographs of old-time celebrity fans.

Those celebrity fans could fill a Walk of Fame. Hollywood Park lived up to its name from the start, when its chairman was studio mogul Jack L. Warner and its shareholders included Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Walt Disney.

Before major-league baseball and pro basketball came to Los Angeles, and Dodgers and then Lakers games became places to be seen, Hollywood Park owners cultivated patrons of the West Los Angeles movie studios.

Unfortunately, if location and management decisions helped to create Hollywood Park’s allure, they also proved to be the track’s undoing.

Rooted for demise

Hollywood Park’s location has been an overdone excuse for its decline. Inglewood’s supposed unfashionability didn’t hurt the Lakers and Kings when they played across the street at the Forum. It isn’t scaring the developers away from the semi-rectangle of land bounded on the south by Century Boulevard and the west by Prairie Avenue.

But it is true that fewer influential horsemen live near Hollywood Park than near Santa Anita, and the freeway commute has only grown worse. Many of them have actively rooted for Hollywood Park’s demise. Even many who are sorry to see Hollywood Park go are comforted by the thought of spending more time at Santa Anita, and applaud the San Gabriel Valley track’s ongoing upgrades.

Then there are those who didn’t think they’d be sorry but are sad as the day draws near.

“Now those people are getting melancholy,” said Diane Hudak, superintendent of the track’s stables. “They’re realizing — maybe Hollywood Park WAS a big part of racing history.”

Innovative Hollywood Park again finds itself out front on a racing trend, in this case the sport’s contraction.

All racetracks are suffering from rising competition for gambling, sports and entertainment dollars. Hollywood Park is becoming the first Breeders’ Cup host to go under in part because of location and in part because of rash decisions like Everett’s early-’80s construction of the Cary Grant Pavilion, which quickly became a white elephant.

Hollywood Park lasted longer than many expected. The Bay Meadows Land Co. said it would shutter the track and build on the land in three years if California lawmakers didn’t allow them to install slot machines. That was eight years ago; the slot-machine concession went to Indian casinos, but Bay Meadows Land Co.waited to follow through on its threat until the region’s real-estate market recovered from the recession.

When Hollywood Park President Jack Liebau announced the planned closure in a letter to employees in May, he wrote: “Ownership has been up front from the beginning that the property would eventually be developed unless there were significant changes in the horse-racing business. ... The land now simply has a higher and better use.” Liebau noted that the owners backed two campaigns for more favorable state regulations.

The thought didn’t soothe many people.

“It’s going to put a hole in racing,” said Richie Silverstein, a veteran jockeys’ agent, who fears the toppling of Hollywood Park could hasten the collapse of Southern California racing.

That remains to be seen. For now, track regulars are making farewell plans. The turf club and track restaurants are sold out for the final Sunday.

Track executives haven’t detailed what will become of track monuments and other artifacts, but did say the dozen flamingos who lived on an infield lake are going to a zoo in Atasacadero.

If ceremonies are planned to mark the end of a link to a golden era in L.A.-area sports and entertainment, they haven’t been announced.

Jack Warner would have thought of something.

Kevin Modesti, a Los Angeles News Group editorial writer, covered horse racing for the Daily News for 15 years.